Author: Paul Burkhart

My annual beach business trip is here. So what’s changed?

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Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about how my job was paying me to accompany some clients to the beach at Ocean City, Maryland for the week to help them grow in socialization and relaxation skills. If you remember, I wrote about sex and insanity that week (and that post caused some interesting problems for me later). On the beach reading front, at the time, I posted this picture:

Well, we’re back there again right now, and just yesterday, I found myself taking this picture without much thought:

Haha. I’m ridiculous. But at least I have good taste in over-sized classic books, right?

Debates with Atheists (And Good News for Them)

/ Paul Burkhart / 17 Comments

Recently, a friend sent me a link inviting me to a debate between a prominent evangelical intellectual and a prominent atheist thinker. It made me remember how I used to eat those sorts of things up when I was in college, and I really appreciated this friend sending it, but at this point in my life, I genuinely had no interest whatsoever.

Eventually, you realize that every debate of this sort goes the exact same way. At some point–without fail– there’s comes a moment when the evangelical says something to which the atheist responds with “well, what proof [or “evidence” or “basis” or “reason”] do you have to make such a claim!”, to which the evangelical responds with something like “well, it’s faith” (or something like that).

And then the debate should end. The fool’s errand of these events has been exposed.

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Here I am leading a Port Wine tasting with Fluffer-Nutter Sandwiches [VIDEO]

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Last night, some of my best friends threw a wine-tasting and food pairing party. Some of the people closest to me presented wine and food pairings that blew my mind. I had no idea that wine could do all of that. It was the perfect way to end a very busy summer.

Above, you will find a video of me presenting my wine and pairing. I led a tasting of a Tawny Port wine and paired it with Fluffer-Nutter sandwiches (my new obsession). I hope you enjoy it and learn some things.

You can see the videos of the other wine-presenters, as well as other highlights of our evening here.

Thanks go to Paul and Natanya Ma for hosting us, and specifically to Paul for taking and posting these videos.
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The Best Bible Resource I’ve Ever Read [casual fri]

/ Paul Burkhart / 3 Comments

To do this Bible Class that has consumed the past few months of my life (and this blog–I swear I’ll stop talking about it soon), I had to read a lot of stuff, including these (as well as their New testament counterparts). I checked out stuff from the Philadelphia library, and watched a bunch of lectures from iTunesU (especially these). I looked through commentaries and websites and articles and handbooks and sermons.

In other words, I at least glanced over a lot.

But there was one resource that I found more helpful, clear, and amazing than any other Bible resource I’ve ever found. No exaggeration. No hyperbole. I’m serious.

It’s a pair of textbooks (one on the Old Testament, one on the New, one combined with both) written by a theologian I had never heard of before. his name is John Drane (here’s his painfully poor-designed website as well). Yes, textbooks. And I read most of the Old Testament one and all of the New Testament one.

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Using the Bible to Meet with God

/ Paul Burkhart / 6 Comments

Last week, I asked a bunch of you how you go about using the Bible and the study of its contents to actually nourish your soul and meet with God. I got some great responses both here and on Facebook. This week, I wanted to put up how I ended up approaching this during the class I taught at my church. It’s super short, not very deep, and much more can/should/will be said. For what it is, I hope it’s genuinely helpful and speaks to how we might meet God through the Scriptures.

How do we move from the Facts of the Bible to the God of the Bible? From knowing the Bible, to knowing the Person? From Scripture being informational to formational?

The Meeting Place of God

As I said in the first class I taught, the Bible is not the passive “Revelation of God”. It is the place through which the Holy Spirit actively “reveals God” to us. When it comes to the Bible, we should start thinking more in verbs, not nouns. The Bible is “simply” a meeting place for God and his people, where he might meet them as he desires, by His Spirit.

When we meet God in Scripture, its the convergence of four things: Us and our faith, God and His Spirit.
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The New Old New Atheism of Simon Critchley & Others

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I have noticed, recently, especially with the waning influence (or at least presence) of the “New Atheists” in the public square, that there has been a shift in the tack that Atheists have taken against Christianity in the past year or so.

Philosophical movements generally begin in academia, then find themselves trickling down to the masses as those twenty-something college students that were influenced by these academic discussions now move on into the wider world. Both Atheism and Evangelical Christianity generally find themselves one generation behind in these philosophical developments of the world.

So, for example, when the world was just beginning to move on into “post-modernity” (notwithstanding the functional meaninglessness of such terms at this point), it was the heyday of  Atheistic and Evangelical evidentiary apologetics, representing firm pre-modernist, Enlightenment thought (on both sides). Arguments centered around the very existence of Jesus, fidelity in translation and transmission, Intelligent Design, and the general historical reliability of the Bible.

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Join Us for a Tour of Biblical History at the Penn Museum this Saturday!

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As a fitting conclusion to the six-week Bible Survey Class I’ve been teaching at my church, I’ll be leading a tour of The University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology of Anthropology, focusing on much of the Biblical History we covered in the class. The museum has a very rich collection of items from the regions and eras in which most all of Biblical History unfolds. We will be following the unfolding storyline of the Bible as we travel to each section, learning the context and the history that set the stage for the faith many of us now call our own.

If you’re interested, meet us at 10am this Saturday, August 25th in the courtyard in front of the main entrance (pictured above). Note: There’s a smaller entrance at street level some may confuse as the main entrance. We will be up the steps where the main fountain is.

The cost is $12 for adults and $8 for students (and well worth the price). The museum is located at 33rd and Spruce (map), right across the South St bridge. (Parking advice: park on the east side of the South St bridge in the Graduate Hospital area and then walk over the bridge). See you there!

Class 6: NT Letters, Revelation, & The Bible in Worship (WE’RE DONE!)

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This week was the last week in the six-week Bible Survey class I’m been doing at my church.

It’s been an honor to do this class, and I feel like this last one went especially well. Others seemed to find it genuinely helpful.

We ended our time in this class by talking for a little bit about how we can use the Bible–and all the information we just gleaned these past weeks–in our own, personal, spiritual lives.

To conclude the class, this Saturday we will be going to University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. You really won’t want to miss this. I’ll be putting a post up on this tomorrow.

For those that have followed in class and online, thank you so much for doing so. It was such an honor to be able to do this class, and I can’t believe I was given the time and grace to do it.

I hope that these resources are found to be helpful to those that invest their time into them; and that they draw each of you into a greater knowledge, love, and desire for our God as He meets us in our Scriptures.

And lastly, over the next months, I will be compiling all of these notes, as well as other essays I’ve written on the Bible in the past and self-publishing a book in both print and electronic forms. If you think about it, please pray for me. I’m starting to see that self-publishing is a lot more costly and complicated than I had originally thought.

This Lecture Covers:

  • A chronological survey of the contents and background of Paul’s letters
  • Discussion of the contents and background of the other letters of the  New Testament
  • A talk about that crowd-favorite, Revelation. We talked about how it fits into the greater story of Scripture, how it’s often misread, how to properly read it, and it’s contents and background
  • How one should approach the Bible to build up their spiritual life
  • Practical methods people can employ to know God through the Scriptures

**Side Note: twice in the audio of this lecture, I refer to Galatians and James as books that may each have been the “first book of the Bible written”. I meant to say “New Testament”, not “Bible”. Sorry.**

Download: [Audio] [Notes] Continue reading →

according to Klout, everyone’s mom needs to look out for me [casual fri]

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As you can see in the screenshot below, according to my profile on Klout, the website that monitors your “influence” online, I am by far more influential about moms than I am any other topic. A while ago, when “crazy home sex” was the main search term leading people to this site, I had a theory. This time, I’m absolutely stumped. Anyone else have any ideas?

my coffee brewing is about to get real… [casual fri]

/ Paul Burkhart / 5 Comments

Friends know that I’m a coffee snob. Real coffee snobs know I’m only a wanna-be coffee snob. I myself know that the latter group is probably more right, but nevertheless, this doesn’t prevent from trying to edge ever closer to my dream of being a real coffee connoisseur.

To that end, I recently invested in the above materials, and I wanted to share them with you on this Casual Friday.

I love hand grinding the coffee beans each morning, and this particular cold brew method creates some of my favorite iced coffee around. Being able to weigh the beans has made a big difference as well. The only things missing? Well, a proper kettle like this one. Currently, I’m using our regular ol’ tea pot, which isn’t able to offer as much control as I’d like.

But maybe, someday, I can earn my coffee snob badge.

How do you use the Bible and Bible knowledge in your spiritual life? [OPEN MIC]

/ Paul Burkhart / 7 Comments

This weekend, I will be teaching the last class in my six-week Bible Survey class at my church. I want to end the class talking about how to use the Bible (and especially the knowledge gleaned from the class) in one’s personal (and corporate) spiritual life. How does the Bible actually function in a believer’s life to cultivate a dynamic, deep, and intimate relationship with Christ and the Holy Spirit? I have my own thoughts on this, but I want to hear from all of you. So here are some questions:

  • Do more Bible “facts” actually have a direct impact on your spiritual engagement with God? In other words, has studying the backgrounds of the Bible ever led to meeting God? How or why not?
  • What practical methods of immersing oneself in Scripture have been most fruitful to you spiritually?
  • How might people use the tools of Biblical Studies (commentaries, etc.) to treat the Bible formationally, rather than merely informationally?
  • For those that are oriented in such a way that they constantly want to know the context, background, history, date, etc. of Scripture, how have you been able to quiet all these questions in order to meet God?
  • Similarly, for those more “intellectually”-oriented, how have you been able to move beyond the intellect to engage other parts of yourself with Scripture?
  • How do we move beyond facts of Scripture to the Person of Scripture?
  • If (as I said in the first class, and other theologians have said) the Bible only “becomes” the Word of God as the Holy Spirit meets us during our engagement with it, what have been the most effective practical ways that you have invited the Holy Spirit into your Bible Study time?
  • In your experience, what have been some of the pitfalls in other approaches that are commonly endorsed by the contemporary church, or what are some of the realities that aren’t talked about often?
  • What would you say if you were me (haha)?

Feel free to respond below, in a Facebook comment, email, text, or phone call. Thanks.

Class 5: Intertestament, pt. 2; NT Intro; Gospels; Acts

/ Paul Burkhart / 3 Comments

This week was the fifth week in the six-week Bible Survey class I’m doing at my church.

And wow, we covered a lot in the class. But still, this class probably had the greatest percentage of material I had prepared that was not actually touched on in the talk. This makes the manuscript that much more full of extra material.

Covering the topics above, I have 35 pages of material below.

You may have noticed that I never actually finished the materials I talked about last week. Well, entering into an entirely new testament of the Bible put me in a mindset that I just couldn’t go back to finish up writing about every one of the Prophets. I’ll do it someday. I promise.

Lastly, mark your calendars for August 25th, where we will be going to University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. You really won’t want to miss this. Details to come next week.

This Lecture Covers:

  • A discussion of the Political and Religious history between the Old and New Testaments
  • An Introduction to the Background of the New Testament
  • Background and context of Jesus, his upbringing, and his life
  • Survey of the content and background of the Gospels.
  • An extensive and in-depth look at the book of Acts.

Download: [Audio] [Notes] Continue reading →

the order of the cosmos; the chaos of our souls [QUOTE]

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We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atoms, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.

— Terence McKenna

This is why, I feel, that Order had to take on Disorder, and order it within Himself: so that all things, though still in chaos, might find their rest in Him.

Visions of Arcadia: the most terrifying art exhibit I’ve ever seen

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This weekend I had the privilege of seeing the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s new exhibit Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse: Visions of Arcadia. The exhibit showcases works exploring the idea of “Arcadia“: an idyll pastoral world envisaged in Virgil’s first major poetic work Eclogues where nymphs and fauns dwell alongside Bacchus and Pan; where human dwellers exist in peace, rest, and joy in the natural world.

(To put it simply: you can usually recognize Arcadian themes at work in a piece of art when it has naked people hanging out in nature–usually around rivers.)

This image of Arcadia, having been explored in art epochs in the past, overtook art once more right as modern art was being born, right around the turn of the 20th century. In fact, the exhibit subtly makes the argument that this image of a rural, paradisal ideal is an essential element in modern art’s development. The modernists’ dilemma–the tensions between longing and reality, finding and losing, permanence and transience, human and mythic–all find their embodiment in this Arcadian world.

The exhibit begins with excerpts from Virgil’s poetic treatment of this theme, set beside works that visualized his words. These run along one wall. On the opposing wall of this introductory hallway, there are excerpts from Stéphane Mallarmé’s modernist treatment of Arcadia, L’Apres-midi d’un Faune, accompanied by pen-and-ink drawings from Matisse that visualize his words.

The exhibit is great, but very theoretical. It works subtly and on nuance. It’s not just a bunch of pretty things thrown into a room. Instead it is a thesis–an argument–in visual form. It watches a theme develop from myth to poetry to visual art (and then from Renaissance to modern) and explores how they are all connected and converse with one another. It’s really like no other exhibit to which I’ve ever been. If you get the chance, see it.

But that’s not why I’m writing today.
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